As the interest in converged networks grows, and as the vendors from the traditional Ethernet adapter
and Fibre Channel adapter marketplaces produce converged products, questions arise about the capabilities
and performance of Converged Network Adapters (CNA) that support storage over Ethernet protocols including
NFS, iSCSI, and FCoE. Intel® commissioned Demartek to compare the performance of CNAs from two leading
Fibre Channel adapter vendors and the Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X520 in virtual server
environments with various numbers of guest virtual machines.

A variety of application performance workloads were run on each of these three Converged Network Adapters
connecting servers to storage targets using FCoE. These workloads were run with various numbers of guests
running in a VMware vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 environment. The goal of this testing was to evaluate products
in environments similar to actual customer environments. As a result, these tests were performed with
well-known disk storage arrays with spinning disk drives in FCoE and iSCSI configurations similar to
those typically found in customer data centers, rather than testing “micro-benchmark” performance with
specialized hardware not typically found in customer environments.

In examining the results of these comprehensive performance tests, we found that for the most part,
the performance of all three CNAs fell into a fairly narrow range. In some tests, one CNA had the
highest performance; in other tests, a different CNA had the highest performance. Because the CNA
performance was reasonably close in most of these tests, IT professionals need to consider the cost
of these adapters, especially in environments where many adapters are required.

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